Building an AI agent inside a 7-year old Rails application

I’m a Director of Engineering at Mon Ami, a US-based start-up building a SaaS solution for Aging and Disability Case Workers. We built a large Ruby on Rails monolith over the last 7 years. It’s a multi-tenant solution where data sensitivity is crucial. We have multiple layers of access checks, but to simplify the story, we’ll assume it’s all abstracted away into a Pundit policy. While I would not describe us as a group dealing with Big Data problems, we do have a lot of data. Looking up clients’ records is, in particular, an action that is just not performant enough with raw database operations, so we built an Algolia index to make it work. Given all that: the big monolith, complicated data access rules, and the nature of the business we are in, building an AI agent has not yet been a primary concern for us.